The UK reportedly suspects that the leisure vessels may used for spying on nuclear submarines
The Royal Navy believes that luxury superyachts owned by wealthy Russians have been spying on British nuclear submarines, The Sunday Times reported Saturday, citing three defense sources.
The Navy had “credible intelligence” that, before Russia’s military operation in Ukraine began in 2022, the yacht may have been used “to conduct underwater reconnaissance around Britain,” the Times claimed.
The newspaper suggested that some vessels have moon pools that can be secretly used to launch and retrieve deep-sea renaissance and diving equipment.
The Times quoted an unnamed foreign minister as saying that, in 2018, the amphibious assault ship HMS Albion had to leave the port of Limassol in Cyprus early after “a huge superyacht belonging to an oligarch pulled up alongside it.”
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The Navy has discovered a number of sensors it believes to be Russian in the seas around the country, the newspaper said, adding that the British theory is that Moscow is spying on the UK’s four nuclear-capable Vanguard submarines.
Earlier this year, The Sun reported that the Royal Navy went on a days-long search, tracking the sounds it believed belonged to a Russian stealth submarine. The suspicious sounds were later reported to have been made by a farting whale.
In 2014, Sweden launched a major operation looking for a suspected Russian submarine, which turned out to be a civilian boat.
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